Teresa Heinz Kerry

Teresa Heinz Kerry is "chairman of The Heinz Endowments and the Heinz Family Philanthropies, institutions dedicated to developing innovative strategies to protect the environment, improve education, enhance the lives of young children, broaden economic opportunity and promote the arts.

"Teresa has helped educate women on the importance of pensions, savings, and retirement security. She established the Women's Institute for a Secure Retirement, a Washington-based think tank and underwrote publication of a nationally-acclaimed book, Pensions in Crisis and a magazine supplement, What Every Woman Needs to Know About Money and Retirement. The supplement was published in Good Housekeeping and US Airway's Attaché magazine and has been translated into Chinese, Portuguese, and Spanish.

"She directed development of the Heinz Plan to Overcome Prescription Drug Expenses (HOPE), a program to make prescription drugs affordable for older Americans in Massachusetts. Similar programs have been studied or adopted in seven other states, including Pennsylvania, Maine and Mississippi.

"She established the prestigious Heinz Awards, an annual program recognizing outstanding vision and achievement in the arts, public policy, technology, the environment, and the human condition.

"A longtime environmentalist, she created the H. John Heinz III Center for Science, Economics and the Environment to develop scientifically sound environmental policies. She has endowed two environmental chairs at Harvard, sponsors scholarship programs for graduate students studying environmental issues and undergraduate minority group students who study science. She also sponsors an annual conference on Women's Health and the Environment in Boston.

"She serves on many boards including Environmental Defense, the Alliance to End Childhood Lead Poisoning and the Advisory Council for the Center for Children's Health and the Environment at Mount Sinai School of Medicine. She is a trustee of the Brookings Institution and sits on the Visiting Committee for the Kennedy School and the school-wide environmental committee for Harvard University. She serves on the board of the American Institute for Public Service (Jefferson Awards) and is a fellow for the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

"Born and raised in Mozambique, she earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in romance languages and literature from the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa and graduated from the Interpreters School of the University of Geneva. Teresa Heinz Kerry, formerly Teresa Simões-Ferreira, is married to U.S. Senator John Forbes Kerry, the Massachusetts Democrat. She has three sons, John, André and Christopher Heinz, and one grandchild." 

After her husband, John Kerry became the Democratic front runner for the 2004 Presidential election, conservatives sought to target her philanthropic work. . In particulr, the Executive Director of the Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise, Ron Arnold - a Republican - wrote a profile for Foundation Watch, a publication of the conservative Capital Research Center. (See Ron Arnold and Teresa Heinz Kerry).


 * Advisory Council, Global Philanthropy Forum

Other SourceWatch

 * Ron Arnold
 * Capital Research Center
 * Ron Arnold and Teresa Heinz Kerry